Funerals Were Expensive, and Purgatory Terrified Everyone
Dying in medieval England was costly to the families who survived them. It is evident from the surviving records that the burden of both money and conscience was a heavy one – but for the right price, families could make sure that even their soul would find its way to heaven when they died.
At the death of the head of a household, two payments were automatically due: the lord had a right to the best animal in the family’s possession (known as ‘heriot’), while the local parish church claimed the second best (‘mortuary’). Added to these payments were the costs of the funeral itself, not least the candles that had been burnt at the wake for mourners, the cost of the procession and so on. But it was the growth in the numbers of masses said in order to hasten the passage of the deceased’s soul through purgatory to heaven that weighed heaviest on the finances of medieval families. One man’s will reveals that he had paid twenty shillings a year for a decade of continual prayer for his father’s soul; it left his own family in such financial difficulties that he asked his brother to be ‘good and special friends’ to his widow and any children who survived him.
But the burdens of paying for masses and prayers were not without their benefits. The belief in purgatory, as articulated in contemporary moral tales, was that souls in need of purification were boiled in cauldrons until they were reduced to the consistency of a newly born child, only to be dragged out with burning hooks and thrust back into the cauldrons to be boiled once more. This was the kind of frightening imagery that made people willing to pay to ensure their passage to heaven – and it helps explain why roughly two-thirds of the surviving wills of peasants contain money set aside for prayers and masses.
But social-religious guilds provided an effective alternative to buying a place in heaven. For the comparatively small sum of an annual subscription, paid throughout the course of a man’s life, members were entitled to a full funeral procession and ongoing prayers from their guild ‘brothers and sisters’ for the comfort of their widow, children or whoever else survived them – a substantial saving on the cost of a family funeral. But it also ensured that, should the family fail to remember them in prayer after their death, someone would remember them in due course.
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